The Ungrateful Refugee. Dina Nayeri
village, he was driven to a mud hut and taken for twice the agreed fee. “Call your family and ask for more,” they said. “The journey was more treacherous than expected.” He recalled no hardship that hadn’t been explained before the trip, but single young men from Iran rarely stir up sympathy—economic migrants, exploiters, opportunists. He paid. He sat in the hut for four days, awaiting the next step, though this one was already disappearing into the dark patches, the spoiled, battered parts of his brain.
The first airboat was too full. Sixty, including many exhausted children watching Darius with shy eyes. A few meters in, it toppled, releasing its occupants into the Aegean. All luggage washed away. The strong swam back, not daring to imagine what had become of the others, those tired children. Darius ran into the woods, where Turkish officers picked him up and took him to jail.
He wasted away in a Turkish jail cell for two months. He had no papers, gave a false name, and spent his days in a delirium. Trapped in a fever dream, he remembers little—it is so easy to doubt him. He spent that time with his eyes closed. They released him when his brain medicines ran out. Too much trouble. “Get out of Turkey,” they said, and he tried to oblige.
On his next try, Darius’s boat made it to Lesbos. As joyful men jumped out and began pulling the boat ashore, a voice nearby whispered, “Don’t celebrate too soon. This is where the hardship really starts.”
“We’re in Europe,” said Darius, to the dark. “We’re on free soil.”
“But we’re not going into Europe. We’re going to Moria.”
III
I was born in 1979, a year of revolution, and grew up in wartime. The itch in my brain arrived as war was leaking into our everyday—sirens, rations, adults huddled around radios. It announced itself one lazy afternoon in our house in Isfahan, between the yellow spray roses and the empty swimming pool, whispering that I might take a moment to count my pencils. Then, that night, it grew bolder, suggesting that the weight of the blanket be distributed evenly along my arms. The itch became a part of me, like the freckle above my lip. It wasn’t the side effect of this blistering morning at the Abu Dhabi United Nations office or that aimless month in an Italian resettlement camp. Those days simply made it unbearable.
Even in Ardestoon, my father’s village, where I tiptoed with my cousins along a riverbank, picked green plums in leafy orchards, and hiked in mountains, the itch endured. It made me tuck my grandmother’s chestnut hair into her chador with the edges of my hands, circling her face and squeezing her cheeks until I was satisfied. It took up space in my personality, as the freckle did above my lip, so that now and then I tried to straighten the papery skin of my ninety-year-old nanny, Morvarid, pressing my palms across her forehead as one would an old letter. I picked everyone’s scabs. Zippers had to be forced past the end of the line. Sometimes when furious, the itch showed up as a tic in my neck. At other times, it helped me be better. It made me color inside the lines. It made my animals sit in a row. I didn’t miss any part of a story, because I triple-checked page numbers.
Now and then Maman joked that I was becoming fussy like Maman Masi and Morvarid, that I was becoming a tiny old lady. This was fine with me—I loved their floral chadors that smelled of henna, their ample laps and looping, gossipy stories, their dirty jokes. As a toddler, I marched around in an old flowery chador that Morvarid had sewn for me. I wore it so much it started to make my hair fall out. In a fit of anger, Maman tore it to pieces.
At school, my scarf was lopsided and my handwriting a disaster, but my math was perfect. The teachers in my Islamic Republic girls’ school were witchy creatures who glistened in brutal black chadors. They didn’t lean down and tuck in your stray hairs. They billowed past. They struck rulers against soft palms. They shouted surnames at six-year-old girls. Nayeri. Ardestani. Khalili. Shirinpour. The minute you turned your headscarf inside out to cool your damp neck, they appeared, swaddling your bare skin again with their own hot breath. The school was stifling, and militant women were empowered to steer girls away from Western values—this made them cruel. If they didn’t like your work, they tore it to shreds as you sat humiliated, picking splinters off your unsanded desk. They taped weekly class rankings to the gray cement wall outside the classroom window. Every week twenty girls rushed that wall. The schoolyard was a concrete block. Opposite the classrooms was a putrid cave of water fountains and dirty squat toilets, the ground a mess of wet Kleenexes and cherry pits and empty tamarind packets that oozed brown goo into the drain. I liked to keep my back to it. But that meant facing the rankings, and if you turned another way, you had the nightmarish Khomeini mural, and on the fourth wall, the enormous bloody martyr fist (and rose). The only way to have a safe place to look was to be number one on the rankings.
One morning, Khadijeh, whose name routinely appeared at the bottom of the list, released a quiet river of pee at her desk. She never moved. She sat still as her gray uniform slowly darkened below the waist, as drops of sweat released her bangs from her scarf, and she wept without a sound. She had fallen three sentences behind in the dictée and given up, not just on the test, but on the whole business of civilization. What a quick, uncomplicated solution, to go feral: to sit there, leaking, waiting to be dragged out by a murder of Islamic Republic schoolteachers, listening for the snap and swish of the principal’s chador down the hall.
On the day of Khadijeh’s quiet surrender, I was number one on the list, so I had a place to look.
At day’s end, I took the short way home, down alleyways lined with drainage gutters where live fish traveled the old city. I ran to my room and thought of Khadijeh, how she had just let go. I pitied and envied her. I knelt to examine my pencil tips, then checked the bookshelf for the seven books I had recently bought, and the four I had bought before that. It wouldn’t be right to count to eleven—I had to count the seven books, then the four. And the next time I bought books, say three of them, I would count the three, the seven, and if I still remembered them, the four, each time I left my room. When I was finished, I breathed deeply until the thing floating too high in my chest (I imagined a metal bar) had moved back down, away from my throat. Years later, when I heard the story of Sisyphus, I said, “Like pushing down the bar,” and tapped my chest; my teacher frowned.
The following week, during silent reading time, a present arrived for me. This was custom. If you ranked high, your parents could send a gift to be presented to you in front of the class. Ms. Yadolai, my first-grade teacher, an old woman I loved and whose name is the only one I remember, brought in the gift to my third-grade classroom. She was Baba’s dental patient, so he must have delivered the package to her. Baba never bothered with details; he entrusted everything to friends. It was a book of constellations. Everyone clapped. I lifted the lid of my desk and slipped the book inside next to my pencils and the tamarind packet I had squeezed from a corner and rolled shut, like toothpaste.
Khadijeh never came back.
I was instructed to work on my handwriting. I sat with Baba on the living room carpet, an elaborate red Nain knotted on Maman Masi’s own loom, and we ate sour cherries with salt and we practiced. I asked Baba about Khadijeh. He said that everyone was made for a certain kind of work, and maybe Khadijeh had realized early that school wasn’t for her. This is why I had to earn twenties in every subject, to distinguish myself from the Khadijehs of the world and to reach my great potential. “You are the smartest,” said Baba. “You can be a doctor or engineer or diplomat. You won’t have to do housework. You’ll marry another doctor. You’ll have your PhD.” His voice contained no doubt or worry. It was just how things were destined to be. “Your mother came in seventeenth for the Konkour. Not seventeenth percentile. Seventeenth person in the country.” If I had to make a list of mantras from my childhood, it would certainly include not seventeenth percentile, seventeenth person. My mother’s national university entrance exam result was legend. I came from test-taking stock.
We did such good work, Baba and I. He emptied his pockets of pistachio and chocolate and sour cherry, and we sat together on the floor, cross-legged and knee to knee, whispering secrets and jokes as we drew bold, stout-hearted Ks and Gs. I clicked our finished pages into my rawhide messenger bag and, the next day, I took them to show my teacher, a woman whom we called only by the honorific khanom.
Khanom